City of Bohane: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

suitcases mounted on bakers’ pallets, there are cages of live poultry, and trinket stores devoted gaudily to the worship of the Sweet Baba Jay. There are herbalists, and veg stalls, and poolhalls. Such is the life of De Valera Street, and Logan Hartnett at this time had the power over it.
    He approached the Aliados. The crowd walked a perceptible curve around its front entrance in due respect. The Aliados opened onto Dev Street from the front and to the Back Trace from a laneway door. It was still, after all these years, the afternoon haunt of the Hartnett Fancy. He ducked down the laneway so as to come in, as always, by the side door – a creature of ritual and set habits. A scatter of his boys lounged inside at the low zinc tables. They smoked, and they drank tiny white cups of joe, and they ate sesame seeds and pumpkin seeds from saucers of thin china delft, and they sighed, languidly, as they leafed through the fashion magazines. The Aliados was no longer in the hands of Macu’s people, her father had long since passed, but somehow it had an air of wistfulness for the old country yet: a lingering saudade .
    Logan took his usual table down back of the long, low-lit cafe. He had a clear view to both doorways from here – he was careful. He hung his jacket on a peg set for the purpose in the wall behind. The wall held photographs, faded, of ancient football teams. These were from the long-gone days when Bohane would have won All-Irelands. The girl – who was as homely as he could reasonably hire, not wanting his boys overly distracted – brought him his joe and a saucer of seeds and he smiled for her sweetly in thanks. The murmuring of talk among the Fancy boys was lower since Logan had entered the place. He smiled now for all of them. He turned the smile around the room; it was a masterpiece of priestly benevolence. Nobody was fooled by it for a minute – Logan’s smile was packed with nuance. Before its arc had fully swung the cafe, its message – its news – had changed many times, just a half-degree of a turn here, a half-degree there, adjusting minutely as it settled on the various parties of the room.
    You would be in no doubt whatsoever as to your current standing within the ranks of the Hartnett Fancy.
    Logan flicked his coffee cup with a fingernail. It tinked , pleasingly. He sighed then in long suffering. Examined his nails – a manicure was overdue. He allowed a particular glaze to settle over his fine-boned features. It was as though to emphasise the extent of a martyr’s devotion to the city; his devotion.
    Now the custom at the Aliados, afternoons, was that mendicants would take a high stool at the bar and there they would wait precisely in turn for their brief audience with Logan. That an audience could begin was signalled by the slightest raising of the pale Hartnett eyebrows. This afternoon was a quiet one – just a couple of men waited. Logan signalled that the first of them might now approach, and it was the whippet-thin butcher Ger Reid who came dolefully across the tiled floor.
    Wary always, Logan would be, of a thin butcher.
    Reid was allowed a seat at the table beside him. He sat on the seat’s edge, and he had the look, close up, of a man lately a stranger to peace. Logan took his hand, gently, and held it.
    ‘You’re not well, butcher?’
    ‘I ain’t so hot at all, Mr Hartnett.’
    ‘Ah my poor man.’
    The butcher raised his eyes as though the mystery of his misfortune might be read up there on the Aliados’s smoke-cured ceiling.
    ‘I’ve a … situation, sir.’
    ‘I know that, Ger.’
    ‘What’s goin’ on, Mr H, is …’
    ‘I know, Ger.’
    He held the butcher’s hand yet and he stroked it most tenderly. Eye-locked the poor fucker.
    ‘It’s your wife, Ger. It’s Eileen. She’s been getting familiar with Deccie Cantillon, hasn’t she?’
    Reid scrunched his face against the threat of tears. That his situation was known made the humiliation complete.
    ‘With your